by Rosie Thomas
In the far distance on one hand was the flat grey line of the sea, and on the other the undulating ridges of other low summits like this one. In front of her was the uneven green and ochre patchwork of farmland, laced with hedges and little belts of trees. Tiny grey or white oblongs of farmhouses stood between the bigger red-brown barns, and when Angharad screwed her eyes up she could pick out tractors inching through the winter ploughing.
Beyond that the land flattened, perceptibly richer, and rolled towards England. The village was a haphazard tumble of little grey blocks directly ahead of her, with the blue smoke hanging above it. As she stared she saw the sun glint sharply off a car turning down towards the main road. Her own home was hidden, but she could see Aunty Gwyn’s old schoolhouse a little to one side, and almost pick out the white-painted fretted board that ran under the gables.
Her eyes began to water with the effort of staring, but still the absence that she had noticed with the very first glimpse nagged at her. It was very beautiful, but it might have been any picture-postcard view, anywhere.
Chillingly, the hills and hollows no longer reassuringly read home to her.
With a small, angry noise Angharad scrambled out of her sheltered spot and ran the last few yards to the summit. The wind up here took her breath away. It was rising in the west and sweeping with it top-heavy clouds that meant heavy rain. Angharad let herself hang against it, poised as if she wanted to swoop down away from the village and into the wilder landscape on the other side. Here the peaks were jagged and the valleys between them darker and narrower. The mountains rose sharply, grey under the grey sky, into splintered ridges that were blanketed in cloud.
Angharad quartered the wild scenery with her eyes, wondering if one of the houses isolated by folds of rock and turf might be Llyn Fair. A heavy raindrop drove against her cheek and a glance at the sky told her that an autumn storm was breaking over the mountains. It was time to turn back.
She scrambled and ran down the same steep tracks, pursued all the way by the rain. Cae Mawr was deserted and the bonfire already darkened by the deluge as she passed by. By the time she reached the old schoolhouse, she was soaked.
Gwyn’s door stood wide open and the rain was making dark pockmarks on the stone passage floor. Angharad slammed it behind her and made her way through to Gwyn’s studio in what had once been the infant classroom. Her aunt was humming in her blue overall, oblivious as she pinched and moulded clay.
‘Aunty Gwyn, the door was open. And the floor was getting all wet.’
‘Mmm? Wet? Why, is it raining?’ She peered out of the window in surprise and then back at Angharad. ‘Cariad, you’re all wet yourself.’
‘I’ve been up The Mountain. Got caught in the rain.’
Gwyn’s air of preoccupation vanished. She bustled Angharad into one of her own shapeless jerseys, then sat her down in the warmest corner with a mug of hot tea. The room was still heated by the old pot-bellied classroom stove inside its tall barred fireguard. All winter Gwyn fed it with coke, and sometimes it got so hot that the old cast iron glowed red.
‘What are you making?’ Angharad asked. Gwyn was a potter, and the studio was furnished with a small kiln and a kick-wheel. Her interest lay in creating strange, fragile, sculpted shapes in translucent porcelain, looking oddly unlike herself, but she made her living by selling souvenir pottery to the tourist shops on the coast and in the more picturesque local towns.
‘I had a lovely big order from Y Gegin Fach for these.’ Gwyn pointed to a tray of brown jugs and bowls, slip-glazed in white stripes and the wobbly words ‘siwgr’ and ‘llaeth’. ‘Aren’t they hideous?’
‘They are, rather.’ Angharad laughed with her. The comfortable companionship took her back to the times when she had played all day in here, picking up discarded lumps of clay from under the table and rolling them into animal shapes before trying to bake them hard on the stove top. She remembered how she had chattered endlessly while Gwyn had worked and listened. Or probably not listened, Angharad thought now. But the undemanding warmth made her want to talk again.
‘I saw Jessie and the others at Cae Mawr finishing the bonfire. Only I won’t be here for the Fifth and I couldn’t see the point of helping.’ She picked up a piece of clay and began to twist it aimlessly in her fingers. Gwyn glanced at her from under her thick eyebrows, but said nothing. ‘So I went up The Mountain for a walk. Looking out over this side I thought … I thought just for a minute that it was nothing to do with me, as if I’d never seen it before. Then I went up and looked the other way. There was wind and the clouds racing along, and all that space. I felt like jumping off and sailing down into it. As if it was there I belonged. Not here, any more.’
She looked up at her aunt for her reaction, and saw that she was frowning.
‘That’s just fanciful, Angharad.’ The word surprised her. She had never heard her aunt use it in a derogatory way before. ‘Here’s where you live. This is your home and where you belong, with your Dad and me. Don’t talk any more nonsense. Of course you have to go away, to school and then to your own life with some future in it afterwards. You don’t want to stay here and end up a solitary old duck like me, do you? But you can always come back home. Never forget that. No one can take your home away from you.’
Angharad saw Gwyn turn sharply away and look out of the windows again.
‘Not now,’ she added.
In the silence the coke hissed in the stove, and the rain drummed bleakly against the glass. Angharad had a sudden insight, and was shocked by her past blindness.
‘You’re lonely too, Aunty Gwyn, aren’t you?’
‘Everyone is sometimes. You’ll have to learn that, pet. I have been, although not so much now. I’ve had you, and your father, after his own fashion, after all. But I’m ordinary enough to have wished for a husband and a family of my own. There was nobody for me here, and I never managed to get away anywhere else. Perhaps I should have made the best of it and married Twm Ty Coch after all.’ It was a family joke that the local coal haulier had been in love with Gwyn since their schooldays. ‘You take your chances, Angharad. You’ve everything in front of you.’
Everything? Angharad thought savagely that if everything meant the regimented school life that she hated, then the world could keep it. She would rather stay here and turn into an old duck, whatever that was.
If Laura hadn’t been forbidden her, it would be different.
‘I don’t like school,’ she said in a small voice.
‘I know,’ Gwyn said gently, smiling at her. ‘But won’t you try to, just for a little while longer?’
After a moment Angharad nodded submissively. But her docility hid a little ripple of resentment. She would do as they wanted her to, but only because there was no alternative.
‘Look,’ she said at last in a different, brittle voice. ‘I’ve made a sheep.’ She held up the lump of clay to show Gwyn.
‘A better one than I could manage,’ Gwyn encouraged her. ‘Leave it and I’ll fire it for you in the next batch.’
The offer would once have delighted Angharad. Now she shrugged and said ‘Not worth it.’ The little sheep was crushed back into a shapeless mass and tossed with the other pieces under the table again. Angharad stood up and took her steaming coat off the stove guard.
‘I’d better go.’
Gwyn watched her. It was several minutes before she turned with a sigh back to her work.
For the rest of the longed-for weekend, the passions of Cathy and Heathcliff were more real for Angharad than her own dull discomforts. She wrapped herself in Wuthering Heights and insulated herself within its drama.
The grey house was very quiet. The ticking of the grandfather clock was the single sonorous counterpoint to the crackle and hiss of the fire. Angharad and her father were gently courteous to each other when they met, steering their talk through neutral channels that increased Angharad’s first understanding of adult ways of saying things and meaning something quite different.
When the time came for them to make the long drive back to school, Angharad was relieved as much as reluctant. As the old car trundled down the street, she looked back once at the double row of houses, the windows decently veiled with lace curtains, and at Gwyn with her hand still raised in a wave. Then Angharad jerked her head round again and set her face firmly forward.
The grey school quadrangle was oppressive.
In the moment or two of silence after they parked at the end of the row of parents’ cars, Angharad waited for her father to qualify his prohibition. Without being quite aware of it, she longed for him to reward her for this painful emergence from childhood with his trust, and his secret, whatever it was.
But the silence lengthened and her father’s hands remained tensely on the wheel. At last she whispered, ‘It’s time for me to go in.’
Her father took her suitcase off the back seat and handed it to her.
‘Remember what I said.’ His voice was stern, unwavering.
Angharad kissed his cheek and turned sadly away. The impression that he was beginning to stoop like an old man clung with her.
She went heavily up the steps and the echoes of the high, bare corridors closed around her.
Laura was sitting on the floor of the bathroom at the end of their dormitory, where the other girls had cut off Angharad’s plaits. She was leaning against a tall, ridged radiator with her legs stretched out in front of her and her hands loosely folded in her tunic lap. She had been looking ahead of her, her expression remote, but when Angharad came in, her head turned so quickly that her dark hair swung around her face.
‘I’m so glad you’re back,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it here.’
Angharad dropped to her knees beside her so that their faces were level. It was important to say what she had to say now, at once.
‘Laura. My father wants me to find someone else – anyone else – to make friends with,’ she blurted out. ‘He said … he said it doesn’t matter who, so long as it isn’t a Cotton from Llyn Fair.’
Laura and Angharad heard only the silence that followed, not the endless hiss of steam in the old pipes overhead.
Angharad saw that Laura flinched a little, only a little, and then the welcoming glow faded from her face, leaving it set and pale. Don’t, she wanted to say, I’m still your friend. I don’t care what happened years ago.
At last Laura asked, ‘Am I allowed to know why?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me. He was very angry, I don’t understand why. It’s something that happened before I was born, even. I asked Aunty Gwyn, and all she would say is that … your father cheated our family out of something that belonged to us, and my father has never forgotten or forgiven him.’
The dark curves of Laura’s hair swung to hide her face as she bent her head. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
Angharad stared in astonishment. In her rehearsals of the scene she had imagined Laura leaping angrily to her father’s defence. She had assumed that they would quarrel and so the breach would be made. But Laura’s quiet acceptance nonplussed her.
‘My father does do things like that. I’ve know it since I was quite small. But I can’t hope to change him, can I?’
‘I suppose not,’ Angharad said faintly.
‘Do you think your father’s right to dictate whether we should like each other or not?’
As she thought, Angharad did hear the clank of the pipes and the insistent dripping that reminded her of the night of her initiation. Laura had rescued her.
She felt the stoop of her father’s shoulders that suddenly brought him almost down to her own height, and the corded skin of his face as it touched her own. Not infallible, she thought. Surely he is wrong, this time? Laura had recognized her own father’s fallibility when she was a little girl. Was that part of being grown-up, then, too, seeing the tall fixtures of childhood foreshortened by wider perspectives across which the cold winds blew?
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I think he’s wrong.’
‘And do you like me?’ Laura had lifted her head and her dark stare drew Angharad’s eyes. They looked at each other and Angharad had the fleeting impression that she could see past the flesh and bone of her friend’s face and into her head.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘No one can stop us from being friends.’
The power of her own decision jumped intoxicatingly inside her, setting her free at a stroke from the weight of the weekend.
She was her own person. She could decide for herself.
‘I’m glad.’
Laura reached out and her hand closed over Angharad’s. The physical touch unbalanced her again.
‘Did you enjoy your half-term?’ she asked, clumsily, to hide it.
‘No.’ Laura’s voice was chill, but then passion broke through it. ‘Harry wasn’t there. I knew he wasn’t going to be. His half isn’t until next weekend. But being at home without him is like having a very lavish Christmas, with all the best and loveliest trappings, completely alone, with no one to share them with. And that makes it much worse, much, than ordinary, dull days alone. Can you understand that?’
Angharad’s hand was released and she knew that she was forgotten. Jealousy of the intrusive Harry reared again inside her. But she put her arm around Laura’s shoulders and comforted her, as Laura had once consoled her.
‘Look, it’s only, how many – seven? weeks until Christmas really comes. He’ll be home then, won’t he?’
Laura nodded. ‘Only seven weeks. If you know it’s going to end sometime, I suppose you can stand anything.’
Suddenly she turned to face Angharad so that their faces were almost touching. ‘You’ll know him too. You will come to Llyn Fair with me one day, won’t you?’
Angharad didn’t want to share Laura with her brother, and she couldn’t see how her father would ever allow her to go. But she understood that Laura was offering her something rare and valuable.
‘I’d like that,’ she said simply.
Slowly Laura moved her face so that her lips brushed the angle of Angharad’s cheek. Her skin felt very cool as Angharad’s instantly flamed scarlet.
‘So would I,’ Laura said.
Angharad knew that a pact was sealed between them. It would see her through her days in this place, but it went beyond that and it would last much longer. She had disobeyed her father, and she didn’t care, because she had this. In the bleak bathroom, deaf to the insistent clanging of the school bells, Laura and Angharad smiled at each other.
Three
It was more than two years before Angharad saw Llyn Fair. She arrived alone that first time, on a hot summer morning, torn between excitement and guilt that she had lied to get herself here.
‘This is your stop now,’ the bus conductor shouted to her down the length of the empty bus. The driver leant on his wheel and winked at her as she passed, and Angharad climbed down the steps. The fresh air welcomed her after the stuffy, jolting journey. The way to Llyn Fair had been made longer by having to change buses with a long wait in between. She had told her father that she was going to stay with a friend in Chester, and he had driven her to the stop for the express bus and waved unsuspectingly as it pulled away.
But Angharad had got off again a mile down the road and waited in the heat for the slow country bus going the other way. Now she watched its reassuring green rear as it ground away along the valley road, and then looked around her.
She was at a crossroads marked by a small white cottage and a wooden signpost, just as Laura had described. Otherwise there was nothing but the narrow roads, only just wide enough for the bus to pass with the long grass brushing both sides, and the country rolling away beyond. At the roadside, shadowed by knotty trees, the grass was moist and verdant, but in the sunlight where it began to rise sharply it was bleached to strawy dryness and splashed with gorse and heather. Higher up still Angharad could see outcrops of bare rock and the skyline jagged and almost black against the blue sky. Nothing moved except the sheep against the hill. When the rumbl
e of the bus had died away, the only sound was the song of a skylark spiralling over its territory in the rough grass.
Angharad squinted against the sun down each of the four roads in turn. She had no idea which direction to set off in, and Laura had said that they would come to meet her. A glance at her watch told her that the bus had been exactly on time. Angharad thought for a moment, then hoisted her overnight bag into the shade of a tree and sat down in the grass to wait.
The sound of the car began as a low hum, then swelled rapidly into a powerful roar. Angharad knew that it was travelling very fast even before it shot round a corner ahead of her. She had a glimpse of a low, dark green chassis before the car braked at the crossroads in a plume of dust. For a moment she thought that it was Laura’s dark head behind the windscreen, and began to scramble to her feet. But when the driver turned and looked straight at her, she saw the resemblance, and the difference. It was Harry.
He vaulted out of the open car and came towards her. His long hair, almost as long as Laura’s, was slicked back by the wind of the drive and it showed that his face was darker and more taut than his sister’s. He was wearing jeans, and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves that made his forearms look very tanned. Shyly Angharad looked away from him to the car. It was a Morgan two-seater with a rakish brown leather strap across the bonnet and a silver radiator grille that dazzled in the sun. Laura had told her that it had been Harry’s seventeenth birthday present a month ago. Angharad felt that she was almost grown-up now, and not easily impressed, but in that summer of 1968, Harry’s car seemed the ultimate in sophistication.
‘Angharad.’
She jumped, nervously. Harry had come close to her while she was staring at the car and now his shadow fell across her face.
‘Angharad?’
He said her name right, just as Laura did.
‘Yes.’
Harry smiled, a sudden gipsyish flash that was like the sun coming out. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait. I had to spend at least four minutes convincing Laura that there wasn’t room for her to come. A two-seater means two people, don’t you agree? Here, give me that.’ Gently he took her bag, and Angharad realized that she had been clinging to it like a lifebuoy. Harry opened the passenger door with a flourish and Angharad ducked into her seat. She was surprised by the opulent embrace of the leather seat and the low, beckoning perspective of the road over the length of the shiny bonnet.